Cultivars

Florida Flame Azaleas - Rhododendron austrinum

I've been reading quite a bit of writing lately about the use of "cultivars" in the realm of native-plant landscaping. A good number express their opinion that cultivars are worse than "natives" - that they won't provide the same benefits and/or that they won't perform in the same manner. The truth is not that simple, of course, and may be completely opposite of what this "collective wisdom" seems so eager to espouse.
I have posted four photos above of Florida flame azaleas (Rhododendron austrinum) that I recently purchased for my landscape. Three are "native" and one is a cultivar. I challenge you to pick the cultivar. Truth is that there is great diversity in natural populations - everything from foliage, mature height, flower color, fragrance, and blooming time. Since the dawn of civilization, humans have selected those individuals within a population that best fit their needs to cultivate. Thus, we have early season blueberries as well as late season and some in between. Cultivars of native plants are still native plants. Being a "cultivar" does not necessarily diminish anything about it. In fact, it may enhance certain characteristics that make it more desirable for wildlife as well as our aesthetic sensibilities. We have to weigh each on its own terms. There is no blanket statement to cover everything and we do great injustice to the forward progress of native-plant landscaping by denigrating cultivars of native plants simply because they are cultivars. We really should have some data...... We seem to live in a world right now devoid of data for many of our inherent beliefs.
Cultivars start out in the nursery trade as a special individual found growing naturally in a wild population. It is not somehow a GMO Frankenstein as some may paint it. As a wild individual, it has all of the genetic material as its fellow specimens of the species, but it carries a trait that makes it stand out as "special."  Perhaps its flowers are just a bit richer in color, for example, or a bit larger. While it may be that this attribute is a negative for pollinators, birds, etc. or that this individual also carries another trait that is negative (less fragrance, for example), it doesn't necessarily translate that way. Being a cultivar carries no value judgement with it.
To be propagated, however, a cultivar has to be produced from cuttings or by cell division. To propagate it from seed would mean that its unique characteristics are lost. Mass plantings of a cultivar represent the same plant and a loss of diversity in that planting. This could be a problem in nature - or in a true restoration project of a natural area, but I do not see its impact to urban landscapes.  Even if you live adjacent to a wild area, cultivars crossing with wild individuals would be swamped almost immediately in the overall gene pool. It's true that the genes that once attracted the attention of a nursery person would be IN the population, but they would no more dominate it than they did in the population this plant was once discovered in.
While cultivars may end up getting used across expanses of suburban/urban landscapes, we need to be more inclusive than we sometimes project ourselves to be. Not all of us desire a landscape that looks like it was ripped right out of nature. To require that would most likely result in many of the "unwashed" returning back to non-natives that would do far less for wildlife than the cultivars they may have used otherwise. A rigid stance on cultivars may get us far less than we desire. We move forward in little steps, not leaps and bounds, and we need to be inclusive - unless we know for a fact that a particular cultivar is harmful in some significant way - not that it is merely less of something.
I have included cultivars in my own landscapes at times - those that have traits that my landscape requires. In my former home, I used a dwarf form of yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria) to pollinate my standard-sized females. The dwarf forms are male. I was not willing to tie up the space in my landscape that another standard-sized yaupon would have required. Because I could squeeze in a dwarf specimen into a smaller space, I then was able to use what was left for another species - thus, adding to my diversity. The fruit I was able to generate was a blessing to my birds and the seeds they dispersed did not, somehow, create a population of dwarf-form hollies throughout my region.
I have also used dwarf wild coffee (Psychotria nervosa) to great effect. Although I believe this to be a different species altogether from the standard form, it is currently not considered to be by the taxonomists that matter.  Standard wild coffee gets quite tall and freezes back severely in temperatures below 25 F. Dwarf wild coffee stays below the height of my windows so I don't have to constantly prune them to preserve my view and sunlight. It also is much more tolerant of cold, which matters greatly where I live in Florida. Over the decades I have been using it, I have never noticed a difference in its ecological value.
To answer my challenge, the third photo is of the flame azalea cultivar - Admiral Semmes.  It has richer yellow color than most and "clear" blooms. The others are all naturally occurring and exhibit the great range of color that exists in nature. If we are to move forward towards our shared goal of creating living landscapes, we need to do so by arming ourselves with data and by being less dogmatic in our approach. At least, those are my views. Proselytizing too rigidly may set us back farther than it moves us ahead.